Their specialities were blackmail, protection rackets and kidnappings. At one point in the late 16th century, 60 of them were outlawed for having, among other offences, despoiled more than a dozen Cumbrian villages, protected felons from the fates they deserved, fought the troops of officialdom and murdered witnesses who might have testified to crimes. Every now and then authority retaliated by burning their lands, but nothing, it seemed, could curb them, until James VI of Scotland became James I of England as well; and then retribution, exercised with a Grahamite ruthlessness, followed. [Link]